Points in Space
by Annwyd
Summary: Several brief pieces based in the world of Gundam SEED. Mostly Mwu/Murrue, but some other pairings as well.
1. Maintenance

**Pairing:** Mwu/Murrue  
**Prompt:** Routine maintenance

Tonomura stared at the hallway's other occupant. "Commander," he said.

Fllaga shifted his load carefully on his shoulder. "Hey," he said. "I was starting to think I was the only one awake and off-duty here at this hour."

"But--what are you doing?"

"Routine maintenance," Fllaga said. He didn't _exactly_ have a perfectly straight face, but he was grinning like always, like there was nothing out of the ordinary here. "I know how you can help, too."

"But--the captain--"

"That's right. Go check the rest of the reports she was running through," he said, "and then grab some rest."

Tonomura turned to go, then he stopped. "Commander, I think I should ask..."

"Yeah?"

"If she was that focused, how did you get her to fall--"

"I gave her a backrub," Fllaga said cheerfully.

"Oh." Tonomura blinked once, then turned away down the hall.

Mwu absently ran a hand through Murrue's hair and settled her sleeping form more comfortably on his shoulder. Then he set off once more.


	2. Zero

**Pairing:** Mwu/Murrue  
**Prompt:** Zero

The cardboard boxes are useful for putting things away. That's all they are. It's a purely utilitarian matter. Murrue likes sensible things like that.

Lately, she's been trying to think about sensible things. The logistics of the journey back to Earth; the question of whether and when to wear her uniform; the taste of the coffee Andy sometimes offers her; the solidity of the cardboard boxes.

Well, maybe not the boxes. As much as she'd like to deny it, they're more than just a place to put things. She can't shake the feeling that when she's done putting his things into them, there will be nothing left of him at all. Possessions left? Zero.

But she thinks _zero_, and she realizes that there's no cardboard box big enough to hold the Moebius Zero, and no other man who'll fly it.

It is, perhaps, not too sensible of her to find this appropriate. But she can live with that.


	3. Teaching

**Pairing:** Mwu/Murrue

Murrue found out soon enough that Mwu was the sort of man who confessed his love in the middle of sex. It was somehow cute, as so much about him was.

"Do you say that to all the girls?" she asked afterwards, teasingly.

He straightened out a little and propped himself up on one elbow. "What?" He looked concerned. Then his eyes widened as he remembered what he'd said, and maybe it was a trick of the dim light, but it seemed like he reddened a little. "Of course not!"

She found herself smiling. "I was joking."

He glanced down rather sheepishly--and his gaze drifted over her, gathering reassurance in this awkward moment in the curves of her body. "I wasn't," he said as he let himself fall back to the bed.

She opened her mouth to give him some reply, but then he looked back up to meet her eyes, and his gaze was bright and earnest. And she thought, _He really means it._ It was an absurdly touching idea, to think that no one else had ever seen that look on his face, that softness to his smile.

_I've loved before. He hasn't._

She settled a hand on his hip and folded the other up against his chest as she drew herself close and settled her chin against his shoulder. For a fleeting moment she thought of asking him if he wanted her to be his teacher or his lover. But she decided for the both of them that she didn't need to choose just one.


	4. Archangel

**Pairing:** Mwu/Murrue  
**Prompt:** give us refuge in the shadow of your wings

When Murrue gets out of bed in the early morning, Mwu pretends he does not see spread wings in the shadows cast by her body. That would be indulgent to the point of inappropriateness.

The dawn light, of course, is simulated. It is the ship's polite way of pretending at natural lighting, at a proper day. Mwu is used to this. He has been used to the sacrifices of space for a while now.

But seeing Murrue rise in the morning, seeing the pale light spill off her body, he can't help but think of a new rhythm, realer even than trees and sky, set by her smiles and the shadows cast as she shrugs into a uniform she has transcended.


	5. Memory

**Pairing:** Dearka/Miriallia  
**Prompt:** remember us unto life

"It's because you're stronger than me," Dearka finally blurted out.

The problem was that she'd asked him the question ("Why do you care? Why do you stick with me even though it's all over, even though it would be easier for you to stay in the PLANTs all the time and never visit?") hours earlier, before the dinner and the movie.

And honestly this wasn't the right answer _anyway_--he had so many more ways to answer it, so many other reasons he came to see her even now.

"What?" she said. Judging from the look on her face, he wouldn't be getting a goodnight kiss after this date, either.

"It's--" He spread his hands out helplessly. "The way you still smile," he tried to explain.

Miriallia looked at him for a long moment. Then she smiled, as she always did. "Idiot," she said. "That's not strength."

"Then I don't know what is," he said.

"It's a good memory," she said, tapping her head. "It helps, as a photographer, sometimes."

It was his turn to go, "What?"

"I can see what was good in the past," she said, "as well as what was bad. And I can keep loving it."

Dearka let his gaze fall. He'd always known he wasn't as good a boyfriend as--

"And it makes me more able to confront the future," she said, "and love that too."

He looked up.

She was smiling again. "And _you_ just make the present light up." She rolled her eyes and started walking again. "Idiot."


	6. Islands

**Pairing:** Lacus/Kira/Athrun/Cagalli  
**Prompt:** at the shore of the Sea, saved from destruction

They each have their own islands. Lacus and Kira's island is a PLANT in space where he woke up from what he thought was death, what he'd _accepted_ as death, and saw her face instead. Athrun and Kira's islands are made in midair whenever the hands of their Gundams clasp. Athrun and Cagalli have a literal island with pretty sand and too many crabs where violence once turned to comfort.

And surely they have islands yet to be discovered among them.

So when Lacus finds the new island where she and Kira will settle while he heals, she watches him sit on the porch and look out to a sea he thought he'd never see again, and she decides that this island will not be just for the two of them.

She drags Athrun and Cagalli there as well whenever they let her, and with the way she smiles and welcomes them she makes it clear: _This is not my home or his home but_ our _home, because we could have been blasted apart into dust in the vacuum of space, but because we held to each other we were not and now we never will be._

And perhaps that does not entirely make up for the way Athrun looks a little shocked and a lot embarrassed when she touches him, or the loudness of Cagalli's complaints about Kira drooling on both her and Athrun when they sleep--

--but it is a good start.


	7. Enough

**Pairing:** Andy/Murrue/Mwu

Murrue will not say she no longer dreams of Mwu, because that would be a lie. At night she can still hear his easy laughter, still feel his eager hands on her shoulder, pulling her up so that he can kiss her chin and her throat, hiding his grin in the curves of her neck.

Murrue does not lie and say those dreams don't come. Instead she wakes and smells coffee and not recycled air. She reaches out across the bed, stars of sleep still in her eyes, and she finds his form, traces his scars with one hand.

Andy stirs, and he kisses her hand, the length of her arm. The way he feels is different, but the warmth is the same.

Murrue rolls onto her hands and knees to look down at his scarred face, holding him there with a hand in his rough hair. It is all right if they are missing limbs and eyes and hearts between them. They have enough to get by.

Murrue straddles him and settles her hands on his chest. There is only one thing left to ask.

"Tell me," she says, smiling. "How did you make the coffee this morning?"

"I--ahhh. I'll tell you later."


	8. Ghost

**Pairing:** Kira/Lacus + Fllay

Every so often, whatever lies beyond gives her the choice to move on--in the form of a too-bright light or a door she could simply walk through, perhaps. But Fllay is not trapped in this world. She isn't cursed to be a ghost. She chooses it, because watching over Kira, protecting him when she can, is infinitely better than anything the next life could offer her. She knows they understand; isn't God supposed to be all about love?

But she understands now too--she knows that this life, the one she wasted until the last, is meant to be about love too. Kira taught her half of that, enough to open her eyes before she died.

It's only afterwards, as she watches him and Lacus together, that she understands the rest.

She sees it in the way Lacus sheds her shy reserve and runs at him, her arms outstretched. She sees it in the way he lets the walls he built from the bones of his memories crumble away around her as he lays his head in her lap and looks up at her, wide-eyed. She sees it in the curve of their hands fitting together, the happiness that binds them in that moment.

Fllay has begun to hope that the next life might hold something like that for her. Someday she'll move on and find out. But for now, watching them, knowing that her devotion is part of what makes them safe--it is enough. It will do.


	9. Earth

**Pairing:** Mwu/Murrue

"I'm a man of the sky and the stars," Mwu told her once, with a practiced wink. Like so many other things he said, it sounded like he'd practiced it once, perhaps in front of a mirror, intending to use it someday to charm a woman or impress a handful of recruits. Like so many of those things he said, it sounded like it had new meaning, _real_ meaning, now that he'd become a part of the Archangel--now that he'd met her.

"I don't need the earth to be this great," he added, with a cocky smile, but as happened so often, his bravado fell flat around her. This time, he hesitated as he finished speaking, his sky-blue eyes catching on her earth-brown ones, and he looked suddenly regretful. "But maybe--" He trailed off there.

She gave him an indulgent smile. "Maybe," she said, "when this is all over, I'll have some things to show you."

But there is no _when this is all over_ for him, and sometimes she suspects he always knew, deep down, that there wouldn't be, that the peaceful earth would never have a place for men like him.

There is no true grave, but, when her chest finally stops hurting enough for her to breathe, Murrue thinks this is just as well. It would have been cruel to imprison him in a block of stone and earth.

Instead she wanders and she travels, sometimes holding his hat in her hand, sometimes only holding his smile in her head and her heart.

Eventually, it becomes more than mourning.


	10. Young

**Pairing:** Athrun/Lacus  
**Prompt:** Lacus/Athrun happy marriage

"Everyone knows that Coordinators age more gracefully than Naturals, Chairman Clyne," the reporter says, shoving a microphone in Lacus's face. "But you and General Zala look half your age sometimes! What's your secret?"

It's a standard question, easy patter for a pair of retired heroes, a chance for Lacus to give the standard nod of honor to lost friends. Athrun admires the grace with which she takes the cue.

"It's not us," Lacus says, smiling. She doesn't look a day over forty--not half her real age, then, but a good quarter of a century less. "It's thanks to what's in here." She clasps a hand to her heart. "Kira and Cagalli will always be young, and they will never leave my heart. Is it any wonder I look so young?"

It is the same old line, the same false smile to cover up the cracks in her heart that have been there. It is only when she lets the smile drop that Athrun realizes, with a jolt, that it was not a fake. It was real. And he realizes more besides: it didn't just become real tonight. It's been real for years now. Sometime over the last decade, the cracks finally sealed up and Lacus could speak of their lost halves and smile without heartbreak.

He slips out of the reception early. There is a part of him that is reeling too much to deal with other people now, it's true. But another part of him wants to relish the experience of seeing Lacus in a truly new light. It has happened only twice before: once when he pointed a gun at her in the concert hall and she stood without flinching, and once, ten years later on the anniversary of Kira and Cagalli's deaths, when she took off his clothes.

The first time, he realized that he had to decide what he was fighting for. The second time, he realized that he had to decide why he should keep on living. This time, it's simpler: he realizes, finally, that he loves her.

He is too busy thinking of her to hear her approaching from behind; he only emerges from his reverie when he feels her hand on his shoulder. "You know," she says, still smiling, "I'm getting tired of lying like that in those speeches." She taps her heart to remind him which speech.

He blinks at her. "You're not lying. I know you," he says plainly. "You _do_ have Kira and Cagalli in your heart."

She cants her head to one side, watching him with eyes that are both much younger and much older than either of them. "Only half of them." And she reaches out to lay her hand on his heart.

He starts to blink back tears, but he's smiling instead, and it's for real.


	11. Remnant

**Pairing:** Neo/Murrue

Stellar sees a lot of things that she doesn't understand, but when Neo is the one doing them, she accepts them as an item of faith.

So when she sees him accessing a computer console with her ID, despite the many additional privileges his own would provide, she does not question him.

But he is in one of his restless moods where he acts as if caged and confused, and so he speaks to her anyway, his hand on her head to comfort himself as much as her. "Look, this image," he says.

Stellar doesn't understand--it's just the bridgecrew of a spaceship like any other--but she listens.

"It's the crew of the Archangel, from the war two years ago," he says. "I never knew any of them. I didn't so much as run into them while training." There is that tremor of unsurety that his voice gets when he speaks of himself, in these moods. "But my own account is locked out of accessing any pictures of them."

He leans forward again, as Stellar gets a good look at the picture herself. There's something about one of the men--

--but Neo points instead at one of the women. She stands front and center. Even Stellar can tell that she's the captain. "But I know her."

Stellar looks at the man beside the strange captain in the picture, and she knows that the shape of his jaw is familiar, and so is his hair and some distant remnant of the way he stands.

But behind the mask, Neo's gaze passes blindly over the man in the picture and locks on Captain Murrue Ramius for one last time before he stands. "It can't be anything important."

Stellar doesn't know whether he sounds like he wants to be convinced, or like he wants to be convinced otherwise.


End file.
